Stats time

I wrote a note a couple of years ago explaining how I used to get a rough idea (with some errors) of how much time was spent in the overnight stats collection by each object. One of the nice little enhancements that appeared in 12c was the appearance of a couple of functions that can report information about this type of thing, and more. These are the dbms_stats function report_stats_operations() and report_single_stats_operation() with the following definitions:

As you can see, there are lots of options to generating the report of stats operations, and you can check the manuals or $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/dbmsstat.sql for information about how you can use it. One of the simplest options would be to run from SQL*Plus:

Of course you wouldn’t be able to pick the option that limited the report to just the auto gather stats jobs (auto_only => true) as SQL doesn’t a boolean type, so you would have to write a little PL/SQL wrapper to capture just those details. Here’s a sample of the (rather wide) output:

You’ll notice in this little sample that operation 25809 is an (auto) gather_database_stats operation which ran 285 tasks, failing on 3 and succeeding on 282 – so lets run the “single stats operation” report to find out more.

I’ve trimmed out most of the 285 entries, of course, showing that the last three in the list failed; but with no indication why they failed. Fortunately we could have called the report with “detail_level => ‘ALL'” – so let’s see what that gives us:

So we can now see that stats collection failed on the one object I’ve left in the extract because it’s an X$ object that only exists when LogMiner is running. You’ll notice that the we also get some information about things like input parameters to calls and reasons why objects were selected (“stale stats” in the first item in this list).

It’s a great convenience – but it’s always possible to grumble: I’d rather like to see the elapsed time for each operation, or even a filter to limit the report to any operation that took more than X seconds. However, if I want to do a quick check on a client site I’d rather not have to type in the code to query the base tables by hand.